In the old days, before XenDesktop, we delivered applications by publishing them in XenApp. When you publish an app, you make it available to your users and they can connect and launch the application through a client; today, that client is called Citrix Receiver. In the prior versions of XenDesktop, you would build a XenApp farm (Site) and install Citrix Receiver on the XenDesktop virtual desktop images so that users could subscribe to and launch applications from a XenApp farm (Site) to the XenDesktop virtual desktop. This is done for scalability. This paradigm of delivering applications to virtual desktops has been carried forward in XenDesktop 7.x; that is, the applications still need to be hosted or run from separate application servers.

In XenDesktop 7.x, applications are delivered from VMs called VM hosted apps. In XenDesktop 7.x, you can now publish applications along with desktops. In Chapter 2, Installing XenDesktop^®, in the Step 4 – creating the virtual...